Saving Garlic from Sprouts

Kitchen Mysteries is a weekly exploration of oddities surrounding cooking and food. They could be recipes that fail when they shouldn't, conflicting advice from different sources, or just plain weirdness. If it happens in a kitchen, and you're not sure why, send a tweet to The Food Geek to find out what's happening.

CooksBakesBooks asks via twitter:

Strictly speaking, no. The sprout is not a a source of the bad flavor, but it is indicative of the flavor. Before being cooked or preserved, vegetables are alive. Even garlic. A garlic is a bulb, much like a tulip bulb, but presumably tastier. If you want to grow some more garlic, you plant it in the ground and the sprout that forms develops into a new plant, gathering energy for the next growth spurt when new garlics bulbs are made.

In order to grow, plants need energy and nutrients. Different plants go about this in different ways. Some store a little energy in seeds, enough food to, under the right circumstances, kick-start the growing until nutrients can be pulled in from the earth and sky. With little seeds, the plant's strategy is usually one of numbers: send off many, many seeds, and hopefully at least a few will reach the proper conditions for growth. The ones that don't make it haven't used up that much of the original plant's energy. The ones that do, continue to become plants of their own.

In the case of bulbs, the plants go with an alternate strategy of putting a lot of starting energy into the plants, and giving them a good chance for survival in exchange for reducing the number of bulbs that are produced when compared with the little seeds. These bulbs do not require the ideal conditions to start growing, because there is so much goodness packed inside the bulb. Consequently, they start growing when conditions are only vaguely ideal for them.

Generally, these "vaguely ideal conditions" seem to be inside your kitchen, roughly 10 minutes after taking them out of the bag. When they start to sprout, the visible indication is the little green sprout coming out of the top of the clove. That's not all that happens, though. Remember that, in order to grow, the plant needs energy. The energy is coming from the very clove that the sprout is, er, sprouting from.

Garlic has something of a sweet flavor when it's fresh. Sugar makes food sweet, and it also provides energy. As the garlic sprouts, that sugar is used up, among other chemical changes necessary to create the sprout and prepare for even bigger growth. The upshot of this is that not only does the garlic lose its sweetness, but it becomes bitter as well. The bitterness is not because of the sprout, as I mentioned earlier, the sprout is merely a visual indicator of what's happening underneath.

The best way to avoid the problem is to prevent the garlic from sprouting in the first place. First, pick a fresh garlic from the store. Avoid anything with sprouts coming out of it, naturally. Skip anything with too much of a papery skin, and always buy garlic that is heavy for its size. Heavy garlic means lots of water inside, which means it's fresh.

When you have it home, remember three things: dark, dry, and cool. Lack of external water, light, and heat indicate to the bulb that there's no reason to start a growth spurt, so your garlic can retain its flavor for quite a while. Potentially months, though I tend to start looking for new garlic after a couple of weeks because, well, I prefer fresh garlic.

If the garlic does start to sprout, all is not lost. If you let it grow, you have garlic scapes, which are tasty additions to any food that you would eat with garlic. You can read more about using garlic scapes, and I've found that it's hard to wander the internet these days without tripping over at least a few garlic scape posts a day.

Boeufman writes: I discovered fresh garlic several years back and have since avoided the supermarket variety, grown in China and at least a year old, maybe older. There’s no comparison. Fresh garlic is sweeter, more crisp and depending on the variety, stronger or lighter in flavour, but definitely tastier than the stale garlic so commonly available in supermarkets.
Fresh garlic is garlic grown at your local farmer and can be obtained from said farmer for a considerable amount of money, but the added cost is well worth it. As it happens, this year fresh garlic in my area is going for $9.95 per lb., not cheap. Last year, garlic was $6.99 per. Is it worth it? Absolutely!
To store the fresh garlic, just keep it in a cool dark spot with good air circulation and rotate the bulbs so the one at the bottom gets some air at the top...you know what I mean.... I buy up to a lb every week during peek season. Last year, I bought enough garlic, which lasted until late June of the following year.
Fresh garlic is usually available late July and continues while supplies last, into September.
Enjoy…

BTW, I live in Richmond, British Columbia Cda.

Why did you tell them that you live in Rmd BC Cda? I dunno. Well stop it. Nobody cares where you live; you’re just being silly. Okay.
Posted: 7:49 pm on August 12th

marcreynol writes: It is best to remove the green sprouts from garlic because it has a bitter taste. It changes as it grow into a scape, but the tiny sprout that is inside the clove should removed.

Marc Reynolds
masterchefsrecipes.com
Posted: 12:55 pm on July 5th

arlene29 writes: If I plant a garlic clove that has started to sprout will I get new garlic bulbs and will this happen even if I cut off the scapes? How will I know if the garlic is ready to harvest?
Posted: 12:23 pm on July 3rd

TheFoodGeek writes: Sorry about that, I had meant to explicitly name the refrigerator as a bad place for garlic. While the fridge is great for cold and dark, it's not so good for dry. You'd be better off putting it in a pantry, cabinet, or even a drawer in a cool section of your home. I tend to keep mine in a drawer in the kitchen, which is probably a bit close to the oven, and so my garlic dries out a bit faster than it otherwise might. However, it's convenient, so I'll use it for now.
Posted: 11:25 am on June 28th

Pielove writes: Great article, but could you be more specific on storage conditions? Dark, cool, and dry? So, is the refrigerator okay? Or is dry more important to prevent mold? Thanks!
Posted: 3:46 pm on June 26th